Jacob's Pillow opens its summer season with a solo performance by Carmen de Lavallade. The Gala that opened the Jacob’s Pillow Dance Festival’s summer season was full of goodies—and by that I don’t mean just the dinner and the whooping it up on the dance floor. The program opened in the Ted Shawn Theater with the 22 students in the Pillow School’s Ballet Program performing an astounding … [Read more...]
Adrift in Fashionable Fairyland
Ballet Preljocaj brings the French company's Snow White to New York. Fog swirls around a dark stage. Crashes and eerie echoes accompany it. A hand rises from a cloud bank, and figure swathed in dark garments appears and begins to walk with difficulty across the stage. It’s hard to make this person out. Ah! A crown. Royal, then. A glimpse of a bare thigh and high heels. Right. A queen. And … [Read more...]
Flying with Broken Wings
David Roussève/REALITY appears at Peak Performances, February 6-9. It’s a story you might read in the newspaper almost any day. An orphaned boy in an inner-city ghetto is sodomized by a foster father and bullied by the classmates he tries to emulate. The kid—fragile, good at heart, not too savvy, and gay—gets understanding from the school therapist, Miss Thelma, to whom he’s sent to for … [Read more...]
Performing Yourself
Members of Switzerland's Theater Hora perform Jérôme Bel's Disabled Theater at New York Live Arts, November 12-17. Ten empty chairs wait in a semi-circle on New York Live Arts’ stage, a plastic bottle of water beside each seat. Simone Truong takes her place at a table holding audio equipment and in a soft, noncommittal voice announces the performers’ first task of the evening. She begins—as … [Read more...]
A New Stravinsky Rite; Forget the Virgin
The Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company collaborates with Anne Bogart’s SITI Company in “A Rite,” presented in the Richard B. Fisher Center’s Sosnoff Theater, July 6 and 7. 1913 was quite a year, and saying “Happy 100th Anniversary” mightn’t be the most appropriate salutation. Forget such minor irritations as the United States initiating an income tax. Think instead about artists who … [Read more...]
Perilous Journey, Landscape Unknown
"The Painted Bird," a trilogy by Pavel Zuštiak + Palissimo Company, at LaMama Moves! Dance Festival, June 21-30, 2013 Pavel Zuštiak’s The Painted Bird trilogy draws its themes from Jerzy Kosiňski’s much debated novel of that title. Images of flight, concealment, disguise, isolation, displacement, and the vagaries of memory pervade all three parts of this extraordinary work. What does the … [Read more...]
Tell Me a Story, and Another and Another
The Tiffany Mills Company presents two new works at BAM Fishman. Remember when dancers rarely talked onstage? No? Then you’re probably still in your twenties. Beginning in the 1980s, when narrative and emotion began to slip back into contemporary American dance and knock its movement-and-form-only stance askew, some choreographers tackled stories that couldn’t be told through dancing … [Read more...]
A Change in the Wind
Tamar Rogoff’s Summer’s Different in La MaMa’s Ellen Stewart’s Theater, April 24 through May 12 A family’s summer day on the beach, what could be finer? Of course, someone might get sunburned, someone might drop her hot dog in the sand, someone might swim out a little too far. There could be bickering. Tears saltier than usual could be shed. But still. . .a cloudless sky, blue waves. … [Read more...]
And Then They Talked Some More
Whoever said that dancers can’t talk well in public? These days, shutting up and just dancing is often not in the cards (there are some particulars that movement alone can’t reveal). This struck me when five of the seven performances that I managed to take in during four days of the annual event-crammed conference of the Association of Performing Arts Presenters (APAP) involved … [Read more...]
Lie There My Art
I don’t think of myself as purist about Shakespeare. I’m fine with Laurence Olivier inserting a line from Christopher Marlowe’s Tamburlaine into his Henry V film and loved David Gordon’s Dancing Henry V. I’m okay with the 1995 film of Richard III that equates its murderous dynasties with the Third Reich. I relished a years-ago Shakespeare and Company production of Much Ado About Nothing that was … [Read more...]